Rival town halls battle for bragging rights in this graphic from the online climate-action game 'Vermontivate'' / Courtesy Vermontivate.com

Written by

Free Press Staff Writer

Kathryn Blume of Charlotte is a co-founder of the online (and on-the-ground) climate-change game 'Vermontivate.' / FREE PRESS FILE

Game on

When “Vermontivate” winds down later this year, the winning town’s performance will be rewarded with a sense of accomplishment, and with bragging rights. Those prizes will be sweetened with an ice-cream social, catered by Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. The winning school wins a 6-foot teddy bear, courtesy of Vermont Teddy Bear. Prowl through and/or play Vermontivate online at www.vermontivate.com

She credits past game participants with upgrades to the most recent version with helping refine Vermontivate’s place in the world.

Serious play, Blume says, is essential to serious work.

In a recent interview with the Burlington Free Press, she warmed to the theme. Excerpts:

Burlington Free Press: Wait a sec — the official launch was Friday. Is this too late to be talking about Vermontivate?

Kathryn Blume: Not at all. The first week is all about building teams. People are earning points for their town, so they’re helping out no matter when they sign up.

BFP: OK. Just so folks know. Now then: Tell me why you got involved with this.

KB: As you know, a lot of the climate issues we’re facing can be overwhelming.

Direct action is important — but there’s only so much that one person can accomplish, making changes in their own life.

I could live in a yurt, and ride my bicycle everywhere, and I would feel very self-satisfied. And maybe I’d inspire a couple of people, but it really wouldn’t help very much.

It wouldn’t help with the kind of broader adaptation or resilience or systems transformation that we need.

BFP: How did the idea for a game arise?

KB: It came out of an inspiration at the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen. It became abundantly clear to me that the rest of the world was not going get very far without the United States, because of our enormous footprint in so many arenas.

How do we move the United States forward? Well, Vermont is in a position to help. We’ve positioned ourselves as this little gem of inspiration in the northeast corner of the country. And although we fall short in some aspects, we do lead the way in a lot of ways.

(Page 2 of 2)

The aspirational nature of the state is ebullient, and we are working to address a lot of systemic issues in as an inclusive a way as we possibly can.

So I asked myself: “How do you help Vermont get to where it needs to be?”

You can work policy, you can work legislation, you can work big systems change — but unless you work the culture, and do a cultural intervention, and try to change peoples’ hearts and minds and habits, then you’re only going to get so far.

We just saw in the Statehouse, where the Senate Finance Committee killed the bill on divestment (from fossil fuels). We had the moral high ground on that issue, but for some reason it got stalled out.

What’s it going to take to address all these issues like energy siting and transportation and a well-resourced food system — so it doesn’t seem like this giant, onerous list?

The truth is, we do have to make some extraordinary and heroic changes in the way we do things.

We’re embedded in an economy based on infinite growth — on a finite planet.

BFP: A sobering premise for a game ...

KB: Exactly. You start to talk about this stuff, and people start to freak out; they think, “All right — everyone’s going to make me become Amish, and there’ll be no more fun left in my life.”

So how do you get people to engage this stuff willingly, with a sense of hope and possibility and agency? To show that they have choices and can make a difference, and become peer educators, and engage in ways that are inspiring and fascinating and fun and entertaining?

It’s a tall order. What happened is, I saw Jane McGonigal on a TED show, about “games for good.”

Her idea is that gaming culture has a number of elements in it which can inspire positive change very easily. She talks about how all over the world people spend billions of hours and billions of dollars playing games. People love all kinds of games, from hopscotch to “World of Warcraft.”

Gamers expect to be given an almost-impossible task as their primary objective — much like addressing global climate change feels like an almost impossible task.

Gamers also are very willing to spend an enormous amount of time and energy pursuing their objectives. They’re willing to fail a lot before they succeed, because they know they’re going to learn stuff along the way, and they’re going to get more chances.

And they have to employ enormous amounts of creativity and collaboration to achieve their goals.

All of that sounds like a perfect recipe for getting communities of people to respond to climate and sustainability issues — gleefully.

BFP: Some people I know are downright obsessive Vermontivate players.

KB: So I’m not a gamer myself, but I thought, “OK, if the game is the tool, if the game is the thing, then a game it must be.”